It Should’ve Stayed Dead; or, The Post-Modern Prometheus
Michael Amhaz (Federation University)
True!—You needn’t think I’m crazy, friend—the voice you hear is mine from beyond the grave. Observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
When I had attained the age of seventeen, I resolved that I should become a student at Miskatonic University. I little expected in this enlightened and scientific age to find disciples of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft and was told by Prof. John Roland Barth ‘My dear Sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.’ So saying, he wrote down a list of several books treating in natural philosophy, which he desired me to procure, and commenced a course of lectures in its general relations.
The ancient teachers of this science promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimaera. These philosophers, like Barth, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and shew how she works in her hiding places.
Of Barth, who was my friend in University and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than fifty-four years ago when I was in the third year of my course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of Barth’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite.
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I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
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As I have said, it happened when I was in University, where Barth had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life—life, that great book which ever lies before our eyes but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written with that language, without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that I confided to Barth my resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.
To hear us discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the University we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. But the morgue proved inadequate—It is uncanny now to think we dwelt on the relative merits of the Cemetery.
Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted whether I should attempt the creation of a being. I was by this time Barth’s active and enthralled assistant, and he helped me make decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted manor house beyond the moor, where we fitted up in the cellar an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials quietly borrowed—materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes—and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar.
After establishing the magnitude and complexity of my plan, and denouncing any argument of its impracticability, I began the creation of a human being.
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Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave? These ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there’s not a living soul to understand or profit by them. Or rather, there’s only one living soul—for I haven’t been digging around in the past for nothing!
I collected bones from Shelley and Poe; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of Lovecraft. It was a repulsive task that I undertook in the black small hours, even though I lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to me.
The process of unearthing was slow and sordid—it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists—and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered Barth scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up Howard. I reached down and hauled him out of the grave. The affair made Barth rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our trophy. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old manor house beyond the moor.
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My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still, I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places.
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It was on a dreary night, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. Its limbs were in proportion, and I had selected its features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! Its yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; its hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; its shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.
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I see… now… I see…
I see now you have yet to meet my Magnum Opus. It isn’t strictly human. Human it could not have been—it is not in man to make such sounds—it is, in all its gradations of morbidity, between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. Either it was born in strange shadow, or I’d found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It’s all the same now, for I’m gone—back into the fabulous darkness I loved to haunt.
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It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given it cause to doubt my goodwill. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in its face, and it did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of its immolation.
We continued our route in search of its purpose. We descended, descending again, arriving at the cellar. In an instant it had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding its progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered it to the granite. It was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I stepped back from the recess. I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.
There was then a long and obstinate silence.
I then heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel and attempted to finish without interruption.
A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated—I trembled. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the wall and felt satisfied. I replied to the yells of it who clamoured. I re-echoed, surpassing it in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.
My heart grew sick again. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up.
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I do not remember many particulars—you can imagine my state of mind—but it is a vicious lie to say it was Barth’s body that I put into the wall.
It was they who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the cellar masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but something I had once discussed with Barth stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity—or worse—could create. Their outlines were human—the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; carrying my Magnum Opus. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity seized on me. I did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at my Magnum Opus and tore it to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault where it should’ve stayed dead.
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Michael Amhaz is a wretch who shambled his way into this world in an attempt to pass off as something sentient, but he’ll just have to settle with passing off as a writer. He has made delving into ancient occult knowledge his day job while he worships the Eldritch Beings that occupy his hiding places at night. He hopes one day to visit another world and witness the birth of a new creation, finally completing the cycle.
